Overhead cables at Fingrid’s transformer station for Estlink 2, a mostly submarine transmission link between Finland and Estonia, in Anttila, Porvoo, in March 2014. The Finnish transmission system operator communicated yesterday that authorities are looking into the cause of an apparent failure in the cross-border electricity connection. (Markku Ulander – Lehtikuva)
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AUTHORITIES in Finland and Estonia are investigating a failure in Estlink 2, a 170-kilometre, mostly underwater electricity transmission link between the two countries, after the link was disconnected from the grid early yesterday afternoon.
Fingrid on Wednesday communicated that efforts to repair the connection will start as soon as the site of the failure has been located.
The failure, it added, has not endangered the operation of the electricity system in Finland. “[The] system is functioning normally and electricity reliability is currently good. At the time of the failure, 650 [megawatts] of electricity was transferred from Finland to Estonia.”
Arto Pahkin, the manager of network operations at Fingrid, told Helsingin Sanomat that technicians should be able to test the operation of the two substations connected by the link, with the results expected by noon today. If the tests reveal no abnormalities in the substations, the assumption will be that the failure is in the transmission link itself.
“We have several lines of investigation from sabotage to a technical fault, and nothing has yet been ruled out. At least two vessels were moving near the cable when the failure started,” he commented to the newspaper on Wednesday.
Pahkin declined to identify the vessels in an interview with YLE.
“The authorities will comment on that. They’ll look into who was moving there,” he said.
Police took over public communication responsibilities in relation to the incident yesterday evening.
Jointly owned by Fingrid and Elering, the national transmission system operator in Estonia, Estlink 2 runs from Porvoo, Finland, to Püssi, Estonia, and has a transmission capacity of over 650 megawatts. The link consists of 145 kilometres of submarine cable, 14 kilometres of overhead cable in Finland and 12 kilometres of underground cable in Estonia.
The transmission link was inaugurated a decade ago.
Aleksi Teivainen – HT
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Source: www.helsinkitimes.fi
